(O Cebreiro to Triacastela: 20.7 km, 7 1/4 hours with 2 hrs breaks; 30,600 steps, plus 1840 later)

Philippians 4:10-13, 19-20
v. 13 I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.

I can walk up hills. I can walk without breakfast. I can walk in the rain. I can walk when I hurt. Walking with Jesus, I can do whatever he calls me to do. Thank you, Lord, for your strength in all the steps of life.

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The restaurant where we ate in O Cebreiro

We walked downstairs into the closed and unlit bar, unlatched the door and let ourselves out into the foggy darkness, where we made our way down the street to last night’s restaurant for our toasted crusts and Maurice’s coffee. We putzed and dawdled as the fog turned from charcoal to light gray and left O Cebreiro at 8:30, catching up with a pilgrim of limited vision and his guide dog.

We stopped in the 8th-century church of San Esteban for a sello, posed in the gloom with the statue of the medieval pilgrim at the Alto de San Roque and stopped in a bar to warm up with hot chocolate and more toasted crusts.

We walked through Hospital de la Condesa where Maurice had done a watercolor of the church six years ago.  Another village, another church, and this one had a rope to the bell tower dangling right beside the door, begging to be pulled. Thrraaanng.

The rope is just above the door to the right

A light drizzle came and went. Up we went and up some more. Maurice had expected the path to go downhill from O Cebreiro. Silly man! I had seen an elevation chart in a bar yesterday and noted the continuing dips and ascents.

The path steepened further, the rain increased, then suddenly the path leveled and popped out of the woods at a bar populated with dozens of soggy pilgrims. When I came back from the ladies’ room, stepping over the large German shepherd lying across the doorway, Maurice was standing under the awning eating a cheese sandwich. I didn’t think this was an eating stop (although I had bought a chocolate-filled croissant as I passed the counter). “I gave it to him,” said a woman sitting at a nearby table. “He looked hungry.” What? Well, her order was so big she couldn’t possibly eat it all and she hates to see it go to waste, so she had offered the guy standing there (Maurice) half her sandwich, and would I like a hunk of the giant omelet? Well, why not? We’re all pilgrims huddling out of the rain. Then she bought a slab of orange pound cake, cut it in pieces for her friends and, when I salivated, gave us a bite too. I forget her name. Oregon, or Washington state.

Finally we had to go back out in the rain. But it soon stopped, and there were church bells, and a herd of cows plodded steadily along the curving street of tiny Fonfria.

In Bedueda we sat on the covered porch of a bar to have lunch. We had ham, cheese and hardboiled eggs but hadn’t found any bread for sale all morning. All the bar had were packaged croissants, so we had croissan’wiches and coke.

Back on the trail the sky darkened and the rain fell, harder and harder. Maurice nudged me into an open shed. “Let’s stay here until it lets up,” he suggested. But this wasn’t a let-up-soon kind of rain; it was more a steady-all-day rain. So we tightened our hoods and snugged up our necks and slogged on. Before the Camino we had waterproofed our zip-off pantlegs, so the rain just rolled off them, but our shorts got soggy fast. Maurice wanted a private room where we’d have more space to dry things, so we stopped at Casa David in Triacastela where the Ohio girls were booked; there was a room for us, a little expensive but it came with breakfast. The guidebook emphasized Triacastela’s pilgrim mass was for “everyone,” but, disappointedly for the waiting faithful few, “the delightful Fr. Agosto” never showed up (must have been stuck behind a herd of cows). We paid extra to put all our laundry in the dryer, then we joined Ohio up the street for dinner.